Thread: License to Kill

This administation is issueing a license to kill American citizens by NOT enforcing our laws!


License to Kill
Thousands of truckers are on the road illegally. And your safety is at stake.
http://www.rd.com/content/illegal-truck ... o-kill-/0/

By Michael Crowley

July 2007

Commercial License Fraud

The Armstrong family never knew what hit them. Edward was behind the wheel of
their car with his wife, Melissa, next to him and ten-year-old daughter and
six-year-old son in the backseat. Traffic was choked to a near standstill on the
stretch of Interstate 81 in Tennessee. But one driver apparently didn't notice
the approaching snarl.
Nasko Nazov, an illegal immigrant from Macedonia, didn't hit the brakes in time
and his tractor-trailer plowed into two idling vehicles, one of them the
Armstrongs' car. No one in the family survived the horrible crash.

Adding to the senselessness of the tragedy, officials soon learned that Nazov
had been driving his truck with a bogus commercial driver's license (CDL). The
suburban Chicago resident had obtained false documents claiming he was a
resident of Wisconsin (where he took his driver's test) and had gotten help from
a translator on the answers to a written exam. In 2006, Nazov was sentenced to
four years in prison.

In recent years, 32 states have reported cases of commercial license fraud, with
busts ranging everywhere from Florida to Ohio to Colorado. A 2006 report from
the U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) identified about 15,000 "suspect"
license holders in 27 states, over a third of whom ultimately had their CDLs
taken away or voluntarily gave them up.

In Macon, Georgia, according to an investigative report by the Chicago Tribune,
one truck-driving school paid private "third party" testers to falsify the exams
of 623 students. When Georgia officials uncovered the racket and had all those
students retake the test, only 142 qualified.

According to safety advocates, there are probably tens of thousands of truckers
on the road with sham licenses. It's bad enough that we're sharing the highways
with these risky drivers. But there are huge homeland security concerns too.
After all, some truckers who get phony licenses may wind up hauling deadly
chemicals or other hazardous materials that could be used as terror weapons.

Industry representatives point out that the overwhelming majority of their
drivers (and there are about 1.5 million on the road at any given time) are
hard-working and responsible. "We have a very strong safety agenda," says
American Trucking Associations spokesman Clayton Boyce. Clearly, however, more
trucking companies need to examine credentials for signs of fraud. Nasko Nazov's
Wisconsin address was the same one used by other Illinois residents applying for
CDL certification.

It's no mystery why licensing scams are an increasingly bigger problem. Since
1980, the number of interstate trucking firms has ballooned from 20,000 to
564,000, thanks largely to deregulation of the industry.

Paying for Credentials

These companies have drawn more and more people to their relatively lucrative
jobs -- paving the way for shady operators to move in. Often, the culprits are
private testers hired by overburdened states to certify truck drivers. One case
involving an immigrant driver shows how it can work.

In July 2003, Kenneth Kerr was taking his wife, Janet, and three children from
Wilson's Mills, North Carolina, to visit relatives in western Pennsylvania. As
the Kerr family made their way along Route 8, a 16-ton tractor-trailer driven by
Ejub Grcic came barreling down an intersecting road and plowed into the Kerrs'
car, setting it ablaze. Janet and the children were trapped inside and burned to
death. Kenneth died later in a hospital.

Investigators said Grcic had been speeding and had run a stop sign before the
crash. A check of his credentials led to Utah, where Grcic, a Bosnian who could
barely speak English, had received his CDL. It turned out his skills had been
certified by one of three companies contracted by the state to administer
driving tests to truckers.

While the feds never proved definitively that Grcic had bought his credentials,
they did uncover that the firms were willing to certify a trucker's driving
skill for a payment of anywhere from $500 to $1,500. A few hundred more dollars
bought the answers to a written test.

Even more disturbing are cases in which the scams are run by the very people who
are supposed to be protecting us. In Illinois, state officials sold hundreds of
phony licenses to unskilled drivers, including immigrants who couldn't read or
speak English and people who flattened orange pylons in driving tests.

The fraud came to light after a driver who knew little English failed to
understand radio warnings from passing truckers that part of his tailpipe
assembly was loose. The pieces flew off and were run over by a van, piercing the
vehicle's gas tank. The van exploded into flames, killing six children of a
Chicago minister. Investigators determined the trucker had bought a sham license
from the state. So had another driver who killed ten people in a 2004 Texas
highway crash. The probe went all the way to Illinois governor George Ryan, who
was imprisoned last year on corruption charges.

Unbelievably, only 11 states automatically notify trucking companies when their
drivers are cited for a driving violation -- the rest leave it up to the drivers
to tell their boss the bad news.

Trucking companies are further hamstrung by not having access to a national
database of drivers' records. Instead, the DOT's one centralized database has
only basic information like name, height and weight, and directs you to state
DMVs for data on offenses. For their part, the states are often slow to put
citations into their computer systems, especially if a violation occurs in one
state and the trucker's license came from another. The lag enables some drivers
to renew their licenses before their bad records can catch up with them.

Moreover, says Jerry Donaldson, senior research director at Advocates for
Highway and Auto Safety, a trucker's record doesn't include any citations while
driving his personal car unless they resulted in his passenger license being
suspended or revoked. Someone could have run stop signs or been caught speeding
while driving his own car, but if he kept his license, no employer would ever
know about it. So these dangerous truckers remain behind the wheel, hurtling
along the highway in their massive rigs. It's high time we put the brakes on
this scandal.

They are going after the Trucking Industry now.

Wait a minute. WHERE ARE THE TEAMSTERS ON THIS ONE???????????
Come on guys I supported you on your strikes. Please support America!

Wow, imagine what it's going to be like with thousands of Mexican trucks on our highways. I'm sure many of those drivers will not be fluent in English. Heck, most of them probably won't speak or understand English at all. This is very scary.

The scary part is they are driving these trucks without inspections. If they do require inspections they will paid for under the table like they do there cars. They will force the teamsters out of jobs. Not only that but bombs bigger than suitcase bombs can come off of the borders. This is another great Bush idea supported by Congress and the Senate. Like I said, what is the difference between a Rep and Dem. NOTHING!
No one in government is helping us. No one. One in the same.
Talk radio has been talking about this for a long time. Do any of you remember seeing the nice little piece of legislation. See what happens behind closed doors? The reform bill is beingd closed doors as we speak.